Post by PreachCaleb on Apr 12, 2017 13:31:19 GMT
This may come off as snide, for which I apologize, but...
They need to make him Superman, first of all.
I'm sure he can be a good Superman. There were some scenes in Man of Steel, as much as I disliked the movie, that suggested this possibility. But here's the deal: as I wrote on another thread, Supes is primarily a big blue boy scout. He is a good guy, not an antihero. He believes in truth and justice and the American way, not as abstract concepts but as concrete realities. He is a source for joy and inspiration, someone to look up to. He will save the world, and he will save a cat from a tree (as, amusingly, he does in the original Superman, still in my opinion the best superhero movie of them all).
That's what Mr. Snyder is missing--the element of likability, of fun, even of joy. He's missing what people love so much about this character: that he represents the best parts of ourselves. As PreachCaleb wrote on this board about Christopher Reeve, "It wasn't that Reeve looked like Superman: it's that he embodied the character. There was a warmth to his Superman missing from every other portrayal on screen since. He looked like a hero. Reeve perfectly capture the hope that Superman is supposed to represent."
That, I believe, is what Mr. Cavill is trying to do, at least from his few scenes in MoS that I liked, and what his director is forbidding him from doing. Superman is not a conflicted, morally ambiguous character, as is Batman or even, in many of Stan Lee's stories, Spider-Man; he is a hero, with everything that that word implies.
Whatever you think of Superman Returns (and I think it was one of the most underrated comic book pictures of recent years--I honestly believe it's a grand movie, what a summer popcorn flick should aim for), Brandon Routh, also with little dialogue, was able to embody this aspect of Superman. (It helps that he too is from the Midwest!) George Reeves, Dean Cain, and especially Christopher Reeve were as well. Henry Cavill, no doubt inspired by his director, is as yet unable to do so, unfortunately.
Yes, he's an alien. But he grew up as a farm boy. He should always want to do the right thing.